Central to the silly arguments made by the “Convention of States Project” (COSP) is their claim that 200 years of Supreme Court opinions have increased the powers of the federal government (as well as legalized practices such as abortion); that all these opinions are “the Law of the Land”; and we need an Article V convention so we can get amendments to the Constitution which take away all these powers the Supreme Court gave the federal government.

But the text of Article V contradicts COSP’s claim. Article V shows that our Constitution can be amended only when three fourths of the States ratify proposed amendments. The Supreme Court has no power to amend our Constitution. And it’s impossible for an amendment to take away powers our Constitution doesn’t grant.

1. First Principles

Let’s analyze COSP’s silly argument. We begin by looking at First Principles:

Sometimes the reasons you’re wrong turn out to be the reasons you’re right.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Old Wall Street adage

Anyone who has consistently sounded cautionary or outright bearish notes during the last nine years of relentlessly rising equity markets has been cast aside. Wall Street is bipolar. You’re either right or wrong, and wrong doesn’t buy mansions and Maseratis. Like that broken clock, the so-called permabears have had a couple of minutes when they were right, far outweighed by those 1438 minutes when they were wrong.

Or maybe it’s all a matter of perspective, and it’s the last nine years that amounts to two minutes. In geologic time nine years isn’t even a nanosecond. Perhaps even on time periods scaled to human lifetimes and history, the last nine years will come to be seen as an evanescent flash that came and ignominiously went.

Everything I said is contained in a single word—collectivism. And isn’t that the god of our century? To act together. To think—together. To feel—together. To unite, to agree, to obey. To obey, to serve, to sacrifice. Divide and conquer—first. But then—unite and rule. We’ve discovered that one at last. Remember the Roman Emperor who said he wished humanity had a single neck so he could cut it? People have laughed at him for centuries. But we’ll have the last laugh. We’ve accomplished what he couldn’t accomplish. We’ve taught men to unite. This makes one neck ready for one leash. We found the magic word. Collectivism.

Ellsworth Toohey to Peter Keating, The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand, 1943

Countless commentators have decried disunity. They fret about our divided nation, warn of impending civil war, and implore us to come together to avert it. Unity’s…

“…At the end of the day, it could have been worse. The Left now has enough power, thanks to conservative voters who stayed home, to impede the Trump agenda, but he has the ability to get a lot of things done with a compliant Senate, including appoint Supreme Court justices who can then undo the last century of Leftist “governing from the bench.” Trump has proven his point, which is that you either become “populist” or you lose, and America has seen how truly divided it is. What a world to wake up to.”